South Korea is continuing the rescue operation on its naval ship that sunk in the Yellow Sea near the border with North Korea late on Friday, with 46 sailors still missing, the Yonhap news agency reported Saturday.
The incident involving the Cheonan vessel with a crew of 104 forced South Korean President Lee Myung-bak to convene two emergency security meetings. The president ordered a "quick and thorough" investigation into the incident. There was no sign that North Korea was involved.
The Navy said it has been unable to establish the exact cause of the incident but reports said an unidentified explosion could have made a hole in the ship's bottom.
"We are going to focus all our efforts on rescuing the sailors for the time being," Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesman Park Sung-woo said as quoted by Yonhap.
The border between the two Koreas was unilaterally drawn by the U.S.-led United Nations Command in the wake of the 1950-1953 Korean War and has been a sticking point between the North and the South.
Pyongyang has not acknowledged the borderline and has drawn a new one on its own south of the current border. Naval clashes between the two states over the disputed area took place in 1999, 2002, 2009 and this year.
The two countries remain technically at war as their conflict ended only in an armistice in 1953.
MOSCOW, March 27 (RIA Novosti)
